Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Consciousness survived death as quantum info

While scientists are still in heated debates about what exactly consciousness is, the University of Arizona’s Stuart Hameroff and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose conclude that it is information stored at a quantum level. Penrose agrees --he and his team have found evidence that "protein-based microtubules — a structural component of human cells — carry quantum information — information stored at a sub-atomic level.”

Penrose argues that if a person temporarily dies, this quantum information is released from the microtubules and into the universe. However, if they are resuscitated the quantum information is channeled back into the microtubules and that is what sparks a near death experience. “If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.

Researchers from the renowned Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich are in agreement with Penrose that the physical universe that we live in is only our perception and once our physical bodies die, there is an infinite beyond. Some believe that consciousness travels to parallel universes after death. “The beyond is an infinite reality that is much bigger... which this world is rooted in. In this way, our lives in this plane of existence are encompassed, surrounded, by the afterworld already... The body dies but the spiritual quantum field continues. In this way, I am immortal.” ...

“There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling — the ‘Who am I?’- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?”

Does anyone take this stuff seriously? They do, according to the article.

I am looking for something here I can agree with. All I see is "energy doesn’t go away at death." The rest is nonsense.

If the tubules and the quantum information together are, on the whole, a part of/substratum of the material reality and nothing else but the latter, then does this... err... "hypothesis" reduce the spiritual to the material?

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As to the "consciousness travels to the parallel universes," let me say, I just "knew" this was in the coming.

I am earmarking the quoted article for an obviously "enjoyable" read some time in future. [Thanks for pointing it out.]

Write your name in the sand. Then smooth it over. Nothing was destroyed, neither matter or energy, except the information imprinted into the sand. Claiming that the name is still written in the sand somewhere else is... looney.

Technically, most of mathematicians can be categorized as mystics. Most subscribe to a version of Platonism, which not very scientific.

Mathematical Platonism: "the metaphysical view that there are abstract mathematical objects whose existence is independent of us and our language, thought, and practices. Just as electrons and planets exist independently of us, so do numbers and sets. And just as statements about electrons and planets are made true or false by the objects with which they are concerned and these objects' perfectly objective properties, so are statements about numbers and sets. Mathematical truths are therefore discovered, not invented."

I'm sorry, but horseshit. Every language used by man, including MATH, is an invention of humanity using its senses and reasoning, and not informed by some otherworldly bullshit universe of ideals. Every language we use has our own limitations built into it. If we don't understand something, ergo, our descriptions of it are pretty crappy too.

They are complete idiots and I don't take them serious when they claim self-consistency because they won't admit genuine contradictions!

"To give just one example, suppose you had an infinite number of coins, numbered 1, 2, 3, . . . , and so on, to infinity, and I took away all the odd numbered coins. How many coins would you have left? Well, you’d still have all the even numbered coins, or an infinity of coins. So infinity minus infinity is infinity. But now suppose instead that I took away all the coins numbered greater than three. Now how many coins would you have left? Well, three! So infinity minus infinity is three!

In each case, I took away an identical number of coins from an identical number of coins and came up with self-contradictory results. In fact, you can subtract infinity from infinity and get any answer from zero to infinity! For this reason inverse operations like subtraction and division are simply prohibited in transfinite arithmetic. But in the real world such a convention has no sway; obviously you can give away whatever coins you want!

Here’s another example of the absurdity of an infinite past. Take the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Suppose that for every orbit that Saturn completes around the Sun, the planet Jupiter completes two. If Saturn has completed ten orbits, Jupiter has completed twenty. If Saturn has completed a trillion, Jupiter has completed two trillion. The longer they orbit, the farther Saturn falls behind. If they continue to orbit forever, they will approach a limit at which Saturn is infinitely far behind Jupiter.

But now turn the story around. Suppose Jupiter and Saturn have been orbiting the sun from eternity past. Now which one will have completed the most orbits? Well, the correct mathematical answer is that the number of their orbits is identical! But that seems absurd, for the longer they orbit the greater the disparity between them grows. So how does the number of their orbits magically become identical simply by making them orbit from eternity past?"

This is not a paradox but a contradiction on its face. You can't have something go on forever but also be completed! It's a logical absurdity right away. Just because the contradiction is immediate doesn't make the contradictions it later produces paradoxes. There is no completed infinite list of real numbers to diagonalize, no completed list of all programs to diagonalize or a totality of all properties to create meaningful (as opposed to trivial) incompleteness. There are no real numbers and the mathematicians are so outdated they refuse to teach finite field speedups to do computer math without IEEE floating points but rationals. Things like DFT can be done to arbitrary accuracy and the only errors are in inputs. Floats are mostly for gigantic computations where leakage doesn't even matter. We can't even teach the math departments autoencoders! They are autistic nerds and losers. All they do is study water. Click defund.

I can follow some of what you are saying. Personally, I refuse to accept the term 'infinity' as a number. It isn't. It's an endless progression requiring an endless amount of time, which is not something that can be calculated or put into any context of a ratio or relationship that has meaning to something finite.